Nick is here visiting from Texas, and we took the opportunity to head off to a Singapore.rb meeting last Thursday with facilities for the meetup graciously provided by the NLB. Ivan the librarian has posted a blog entry about his experience at the meetup, and seems enthusiastic in how the library might help to support the community. If you’re in Singapore and have any interest in Ruby or Rails at all, it’s time to get involved in the community – this is a great place to learn, ask questions and hang out with some really smart folks. Join the google group, or come hang out on IRC (Freenode) at #singapore.rb, I’m always so lonely by myself.

Just got back from a week in Thailand / Laos. Lots of good times, and I have a new coffee saying:

Once you go black, you never go back (unless you’re in Laos or Vietnam).

Because they serve it oh-so-nice with sweetened condensed milk. Especially in Vietnam.

Don’t know what to say on this front except I’m totally speechless. It’s only a matter of time now before the rest of the labels are forced to crawl out from under the luddite rock that they’ve been hiding under, and follow EMI’s brilliant move into the non-DRM arena.

Note to EMI Executives: As soon as it becomes available, I will immediately go through my purchased music from iTunes, and upgrade all EMI albums to DRM-Free, happily paying the extra 30 cents per track. After that, I will find and buy more DRM-Free EMI albums just to celebrate this glorious day. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

Someone passed me an interesting link to a recent blog entry by Dave Thomas on what he dubs the RADAR Architecture. It’s a pretty interesting read, and I think that one thing I’d love to see is the browser to become a bit more of a smart client / application platform in the coming years.

One thing that he suggests architecturally in crafting applications is building web-based applications as essentially REST-based services, and separating out what he dubs an “HTML Presentation Server” in one form or another as a thin proxy in front of the actual application. It sounds great to me in theory, but I seriously wonder how much code duplication (logic-wise) would be necessary in order to facilitate that.

Some of the comments on the post seem to talk about how the presentation layer would then be confined to working with a data structure (probably XML) without any smarts in it, instead of having an actual object instance with which you can do some smarter things like validation and what have you.

Either way, it’s a really interesting read, and I’d be willing to bet that Dave’s onto something with the coming years hopefully seeing a transformation of the browser from a dumb recipient into a smarter application client.